Tuppet's cousin has been busy constructing a star to sit on top of our turret. We are very impressed with his work - he also constructed the mini trees in our front yard which we are very happy with. Today Tuppet added some lights to the sturdy looking wireframe and it is really starting to shine. More lights will be added before installation.

The whole thing is bigger than Tuppet, who can only just reach the top.

The five wiring boxes are now complete, or they would be if we hadn't managed to loose two of the 400W power supplies (the big greenish grey boxes). Each box has external connection ports for cat5 (carrying DMX) and a caravan plug so that power can be connected using a regular extension cord.

In these pictures you can see the new smaller controllers we have from Ray Wu, a very popular Chinese supplier through Alibaba.com (with the blue labels). So far these are wonderful. 24 Outputs (the much larger green ones in the left picture are only 16!), 24 Volts, and channels are set with dials so you always know exactly what is set and you can change things very easily while the unit is on the network - simply power down and start again.

You can also see that the boxes look nice and tidy until the tail connectors are attached to the controllers. We will have some more cable management installed before the boxes go up so it will all be nice and tidy!

With a new collection of controllers and lights arriving we need some new boxes to mount everything in at Christmas, so Tuppetsdad has been busy playing with his dovetail jig.

We now have 5 big boxes to put everything in at Christmas - nice and tidy, reasonably waterproof (the boxes will be under the eaves so waterproof is not a big issue) and made to fit the house. The boxes are now getting a coat of paint to match the house before they are mounted in preparation for Christmas - just 7 weeks to go!